| Entry: | NMR is continuing to do a fabulous job with the plaster layers in Sp.454. She finished the part where the layer run up to the wall. I really want to hit this thing underneath to find out whether it is fill or brick material, but we will have to be patient. She then moved towards the centre of the room to identify at least four layers on top of each other, one of which seems to be burnt. She started removing them from the top – more soon.
TSK moved back his section through F.2424 into F.3303 and the buttress. He spotted something crazy – while the uppermost few cm of F.3303 were clearly abutting F.2424, there is no plaster visible further down, and the mortar and brick layers seem to be continuous. How is that possible? Unless we postulate that F.3303 was really just the rest of a wall (only a few cm high) abutting F.2424, and both are sitting on a two-bricks-wide wall. But in both facades we see no break in the regular interspacing of mortar and brick. So this is not possible.
Maybe there just is no plaster preserved on lower F.2424? We will check the continuing mortar and mud brick lines tomorrow. Maybe it turns out not to be true.
TMK finished his room fill/erosion layer 31141 today. Still – clearly erosion from surrounding features. Still – some artefacts mixed into that. Still – walls around this fill difficult to find, especially the northern wall F.3310.
APV removed more of F.5062. She found that a part of F.3346 was still left, abutting the plaster of F.5062. She went down to the top of one brick, which turned out to be as irregular as many other brick tops we saw (wet building!). Then she paused this tasks to team up with TMK to excavated room fill in the centre of the building – the space is so small that only one tasks is possible at a time. They brushed and photographed the area. Tomorrow they are going to tackle the fallen wall 18372, removed all fill left around it, see more of it and remove it eventually.
TET took down more of wall F.2425 and F.2426. They really are not binding. He got some samples out and we got a few good close-up shots of the insides of bricks.
DSE nearly finished flattening the top of wall F.3306. We removed the upper part of that wall to both get a better feeling for the wall material and to see parts of F.5074 and F.3306 in section, as this northern wall seems to have an interesting history and might indicate that it at some point belonged to a space north of the wall. Maybe a room contemporary to one of the phases in B.107? That would be unusual.
JMK finished her room fill unit 31114 in B.107 and now is entirely free to work in Sp446. She cleaned the northern and eastern section through that room fill and then started removing the mud brick-like deposit closest to B.98. We will not be overly gentle with the deposits in the eastern half of the room, which she is taking down to the floor level of Space 452, as we will be able to see deposits or features in the NS section that JMK will make through the room.
In Space 448, we decided to not finish taking off 10cm in the entire room, but to go deeper in front of wall F.3322 and then take 20cm off in the entire room. After these 20cm, the maybe-wall we saw yesterday in plan could not be found any more – therefore was no wall. The fill 31169 peels easily from wall F.3322, despite that wall seemingly not being plastered, or at least not plastered with while marl.
CLC finished removed floor 31143 and then cleaned the area. We saw one homogeneous fill area, no features yet. Interestingly, the upper few mm of this fill seemed more compacted and dense. We discussed whether or not this might be an applied preparation layer, but when trying to remove the compact from the fill underneath, it is not coming off easily or naturally. We therefore concluded that the uppermost bit of the under-floor fill must have become compacted during use of the floor or maybe also through some kind of chemical interaction with the floor material.
GWN finished clarifying the plaster feature 31126, which is now tentatively called a “basin” since one colleague from the botany lab stopped by a few days ago and said this looks less like a storage installation and more like an installation to prepare food in. Its shape is difficult to describe in words; it seems disturbed, not only by animal holes, but definitely is a constructed feature. It abuts the plaster of both the southern and the western wall of the space. |
